reframing public education

7/29/2019 Reframing Public Education

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Reframing Public EducationCountering school rankings

and debunking the neoliberal agenda

Donald Gutstein

July 31, 2010


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Reframing public education: Countering school rankings and debunking the neoliberal agenda

2 Donald Gutstein, July 31, 2010

1. Introduction and study overviewWest Vancouver real estate agent Brock Smeaton thinks highly of the Fraser Institutesreport card. Independent assessments of educational institutions such as the FraserInstitutes annual ranking of BC schools consistently place West Vancouver schools in

the upper echelons, he wrote on his web site touting West Vancouver homes.Parent T.W.H. obtained Fraser Institute school rankings to support his claim for custodyof his children, in an action in the BC Supreme Court. He lived near a school ranked53rd, while the school that parent K.L.H. wanted the children to attend was ranked 354th.

A mother with the screen name rosedale informed other discussants on the WeddingBells discussion forum that We are using [the school rankings] while house shopping.You can tell a lot for [sic] these results and there is no way we will be buying a house inan area that has below average results on these tests.

Three snapshots of how people are using the Fraser Institute report card. Report card author PeterCowley boasts that in 2009 alone visitors to the Fraser Institutes website requested nearly200,000 tables of detailed results for individual BC elementary schools.1 But what kind of

information are these visitors getting? On the 2010 report card for BC elementary schools, forinstance, Roosevelt Park in Prince Rupert was ranked 875th out of 876 schools in the province.Yet economist David Johnson of the C.D. Howe Institute says that, based on his ranking system,Roosevelt rates as one of the top 17 schools in the province! How is such an enormousdiscrepancy possible?

Then there is the case of Torquay Elementary in Victoria, which the Fraser ranked as 131st in its2009 report. University of Victoria education professor Helen Raptis notes that the percentage ofTorquays Grade 4 students that met or exceeded expectations on the Foundation SkillsAssessment tests (the basis for the Fraser and C.D. Howe rankings), was 97 percent (forreading), 85 percent (writing), and 87 percent (numeracy). These figures, Raptis observes, are

significantly higher than those for Pacific Christian School, which scored 83 percent (reading),69 percent (writing), and 76 percent (numeracy). Yet Pacific Christian ranked 108th.

The elementary school report card has been criticized on numerous grounds: the FSA, on whichit relies, is a poor method of assessing student achievement; the methodology the Fraser Instituteuses to compile school rankings from FSA results is deeply flawed; and many valuable criteriaare ignored in evaluating school achievement. Despite these deficiencies, which are detailed inthe report and which should render the rankings worthless, the rankings have been a smash hitwith CanWest and Sun newspapers and therefore with many parents. The institute produced thefirst BC secondary report card in 1998. It followed with report cards for BC elementary schoolsand for elementary and secondary schools in Alberta and Ontario. It collaborated on cards forQuebec and Atlantic Canada. By 2010, the institute had produced 60 cards. The project must be

working the way the institute intends, otherwise it would not have invested so much effort andmoney in what Peter Cowley claims is the report cards purpose: to encourage schools toimprove:

The act of publicly ranking schools attracts attention, and this can providemotivation. Schools that perform well or show consistent improvement areapplauded. Poorly performing schools generate concern, as do those whose

1Peter Cowley, Value of FSA data is in seeking improvement, Nanaimo Daily News, 12 Feb 2010, A10.


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Donald Gutstein, July 31, 2010 3

performance is deteriorating. This inevitable attention provides an incentive forall those connected with a school to focus on student results.2

But this claim is not credible. As this report will demonstrate, ranking schools is a carefullyconceived stratagem to accelerate the privatization of education in Canada. When seen in thecontext of the institutes other education activitiesproviding privately financed vouchers so

that low-income students can attend private schools, encouraging private school chains to enterthe Canadian education market, training teachers in neoliberal economicsthe report cardclearly has a purpose different from its authors claims. Neither report card author, Cowley orStephen Easton, has a background in education. They come from marketing and neoliberaleconomics respectively, which perhaps is a better indicator of the report cards purpose. It is partof an arsenal of privatization techniques launched in 1955 when economist Milton Friedmanargued for a system of government-provided vouchers that would allow students to go to anyschool they desired, for-profit, non-profit or government (Friedmans term for public schools).

The report card illustrates the trend by advocates for choice in education to avoid the establishedpeer-review process and make their case more directly with the media, policy makers andeducational consumers. Traditional scholarly processes and review for quality control havelargely been circumvented. As former SFU education dean Paul Shaker notes, the Fraser Institutereports fail to meet scholarly standards because no hypothesis is tested, no peers review theprocess, no experts are consulted, and tests are used for purposes for which they were notintended.3 As a result, notes Helen Raptis, the Fraser Institutes overly simplistic schoolrankings are not valid sources for parental decision-making because of the flawed methods usedto derive them.4

But critiquing the report card will not make it go away. As social psychologists have discovered,denying a claimschool report cards are a poor way to assess student achievementsimplyreinforces the claim. It is better to make a new claim that makes no reference to the original one.Cognitive scientist George Lakoff argues that two frames, or fundamental values, dominate

modern western societies. He calls the frames conservative5

and progressive. They may also bethought of as freedom and justice. In the 1960s these values merged in the civil-rightsmovements of African-Americans, students, women, and other oppressed groups. As MartinLuther King Jr. said in his stirring I Have a Dream speech on August 28, 1963, at the LincolnMemorial in Washington, DC: I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a statesweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformedinto an oasis of freedom and justice. But half a century later, the oasis of freedom and justiceremains a speck on the horizon. For that unhappy state of affairs we can thank the work ofneoliberals like Milton Friedman, who captured control of public policy by driving a wedgebetween freedom and justice, sanctifying the former and demonizing the latter. The lofty value ofindividual freedom was debased into shabby advocacy for the free market. Freedom of speech, of

association, and of choice became freedom to exploit and freedom to be greedy, as Austrianphilosopher Karl Polanyi warned. Freedom came to mean being free to choose betweencompeting consumer products, such as higher- and lower-ranking schools. As the Fraser Institute

2 Peter Cowley, Stephen Easton and Michael Thomas, Report card on British Columbias elementary schools2010, Fraser Institute, Feb 2010, 3.3 Janet Amsden, The great debate in school measurement,Teacher Newsmagazine 19, No. 5, Mar 2007,http://bctf.ca/publications/NewsmagArticle.aspx?id=11484.4 Helen Raptis, The case against the Fraser Institutes school rankings,Victoria Times-Colonist, 7 Feb 2010, C10.5 Lakoffs conservative frame combines neoliberalism (economic conservatism) and social conservatism.
http://bctf.ca/publications/NewsmagArticle.aspx?id=11484http://bctf.ca/publications/NewsmagArticle.aspx?id=11484http://bctf.ca/publications/NewsmagArticle.aspx?id=11484


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puts it, the purpose of the Children First voucher program is to help families afford the schoolof their choice.

Justice, in its many manifestationssocial, economic, environmentalwas attacked mercilessly,while the two institutions most capable of promoting justice, government and unions, were castas enemies to be crushed. For Fox News Channel resident demagogue Glenn Beck, social justice

is a threat to freedom. He recently defined it as forced redistribution of wealth with a hostilitytoward individual property rights, under the guise of charity and/or justice, perpetrated byprogressives, socialists, and Marxists.

Unions have a long history of promoting justice. The BC Teachers Federation, for example,engages in many social-justice initiatives that focus on poverty, child and youth issues, racerelations, gender equity, homophobia and heterosexism, bullying, environmental issues,globalization, and violence prevention, as well as on aboriginal education. The task forprogressives is to condense social-justice programs into a frame that can be clamped ontoeducation and can challenge the hateful rhetoric of the Glenn Becks of the world.

If public education supporters hope to counter the success of the neoliberals, they must stop

denying the free-market frame and start constructing a frame based on social justice, and theymust be prepared to do this consistently for many years.

2. How Neoliberalism colonized educationNeoliberalism is a slippery concept to pin down. Those who are accused of being neoliberals nolonger use the term, preferring to call themselves libertarians (in North America), market liberalsor classical liberals. In the early years, though, they did call themselves neoliberals: MiltonFriedman even used the word in the title of a 1951 survey of his comrades.6

As David Harvey defines the term in hisA Brief History of Neoliberalism, neoliberalism is atheory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced

by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional frameworkcharacterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the stateis to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices, using force, ifneed be, to guarantee the proper functioning of markets. If markets dont exist (in areas such asland, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution) then they must becreated, by state action if necessary.7

The roots of neoliberalism can be traced to 1947, when Austrian economist Friedrich Hayekinvited leading European and American intellectuals of various free-market persuasions to meetat the Hotel du Parc in Mont Plerin, a village close to Lake Geneva in Switzerland. During theirten days of talk they agreed to form the Mont Plerin Society, with a mandate to work toward an

individualistic, non-egalitarian society governed by market transactions. But this would becomereality, they understood, only if they could capture and reorganize political power. This activistambition differentiates Mont Plerin Society liberals from those who came before. They stoppedusing the term in the late 50s because they didnt want to dwell on the fact that the liberalismthey espoused differed radically from the liberalism that stretched from Adam Smith (1723

6 Milton Friedman, Neo-liberalism and its prospects,Farmand, 17 Feb 1951, 89-93.7 David Harvey,A brief history of neoliberalism, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, 2.


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1790) until their time.8 Key was their belief that the market society they desired would not comeabout without concerted political effort and organization. They were certainly not laissez-faireconservatives who believed government should just not interfere in economic affairs. They wereradicals who demanded dramatic government action to create and enforce markets.

In postwar Europe and North America, they couldnt hope to accomplish this task by entering

politics directly. The obstacle was that the prevailing climate of ideas supported the introductionof social and economic rights and the construction of a welfare state which, for Hayek and hisfellow neoliberals, would lead to a nightmare world of collectivism and socialism. To capturepolitical power, they would first have to alter the intellectual climate, writes Timothy Mitchellof Columbia University.9

To alter the intellectual climate, Hayek wrote in a 1949 essay in the University of Chicago LawReview, neoliberals would have to reach what he termed second-hand dealers in ideasjournalists, teachers, commentatorswho control the distribution of expert knowledge to thepublic.10 To accomplish this further task, the intellectuals in the Mont Plerin Society designedtheir own network of dealerships, or as we know them today, think tanks. Backed with fundsfrom corporations and their owners, usually channeled through private foundations, Mitchellwrites, think tanks repackage neoliberal doctrines in forms that second-hand dealers couldretail among the general public.11 Doctrine was supported with evidence presented as research,which was then translated into books, reports, studies, teaching materials and news stories anddistributed to news organizations. Later, think tanks developed a variety of simplistic indexesbecause these were more likely to receive favourable distribution to target audiences. Annualindexes are effective in persuading people to change their minds because they prey on mostpeoples discomfort with statistics, and they are repeated year after year.

Sixty years after a despondent Hayek invited his fellow neoliberals to Mont Plerin, theorganization they created constitutes a worldwide network of over 1,000 scholars, journalists,think tank professionals and corporate and political leaders, with a closely related network of

over 200 neoliberal partisan think tanks. Many countries have lived through the election ofneoliberal governments and the implementation of neoliberal doctrine. Even countries wherenominally progressive or liberal parties were victorious have been constrained from introducingprogressive measures because of the changed climate of ideas.

The project would have floundered in impotence had it not been for key financial andorganizational support from a group of conservative businessmen. Harold Luhnow headedVolker & Co., the USs largest wholesale interior furnishings business, and was a strident anti-New Deal conservative. Luhnow financed the creation of the first neoliberal think tank, theFoundation for Economic Education, in suburban New York state in 1946 and supported thefounding of the Mont Plerin Society in 1947. Luhnow also financed the Free Market Project atthe University of Chicagos Law School, later transformed into the Chicago School of economics

which, for a few years, helped create a veritable free-market state under the brutal heel ofChilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Democracy, Hayek noted, was not a necessary precondition

8 Philip Mirowski, Defining neoliberalism, in Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The road from MontPlerin: The making of the neoliberal thought collective, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2009, 427.9 Timothy Mitchell, How neoliberalism makes its world, in Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The roadfrom Mont Plerin: The making of the neoliberal thought collective, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press,2009, 387.10 Friedrich Hayek, Intellectuals and socialism,University of Chicago Law Review 16, no. 3: 417-433.11 Mitchell, 387.


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for a free-market state. In fact, he said on several occasions, it could be an impediment, as theChilean experiment demonstrated.

More relevant to the Canadian situation was the work of Antony Fisher, a British businessmanwho made a fortune by introducing factory-farmed chicken in Britain after the Second WorldWar. Like most rich people, Fisher believed that capitalism produces more wealth and distributes

it more fairly than any amount of government intervention can ever achieve. Fisher had readand embracedHayeks The Road to Serfdom, in which Hayek urged reducing governmentintervention in the economy to a bare minimum because any government actions would lead toslavery and serfdom. Politics, Fisher thought, might be an avenue to promote his ideas. ButHayek advised Fisher instead to set up a think tank to supply intellectuals in academia and themediathe second-hand dealerswith authoritative studies of free-market economics and theirapplication to policy issues. Fisher liked the idea and obliged by establishing the Institute ofEconomic Affairs in Britain in 1955 which, along with other neoliberal think tanks and over 20years of effort, was instrumental in altering the British climate of ideas to such an extent thatMargaret Thatcher could be elected prime minister. Before that momentous day, Fisher sold hispoultry business and became very wealthy. In 1970 he founded the IEAs American counterpart,

the International Institute for Economic Research in Los Angeles. And shortly after that, Fisherwas invited to Vancouver by Michael Walker (who knew of Fishers work through Walkersfriendship with Milton Friedman) and MacMillan Bloedel vice-president Patrick Boyle, to helpestablish the first Canadian neoliberal dealership, the Fraser Institute. Fisher also established twomore think tanks, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research with William Casey, a Wall Streetspeculator and later, Ronald Reagans CIA director, and the Pacific Research Institute, with localbusiness leader James North in San Francisco, choosing geographical names to blur theirideological purpose.

Fisher received requests from business people around the world to help them set up similarorganizations in their own countries to promote the free market (i.e., capitalism) and bringdemocracy to heel. In 1981, he established the Atlas Economic Research Foundation to automatethe process of establishing and running such think tanks, having perfected a formula for funding,projects, experts and promotion. Atlas is based in Arlington, Virginia, and is named after AynRands libertarian screedAtlas Shrugged. Today it works with more than two hundredneoliberalAtlas calls them market-orientedthink-tanks around the world.12 Atlassexecutive director, Alex Chafuen, is a long-standing Fraser Institute trustee. When Atlascelebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary, it could boast of affiliated think-tanks in six Canadianprovinces, forty-four American states, nearly every country in Central and South America,eleven African and Middle Eastern countries, every country in Greater Europe except Latvia, theNetherlands and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and most countries of South and Southeast Asia. Itwas an instructive display of global corporate power. But, as was the intention of the projectfrom the beginning, global corporate power was masked behind a facade of independent

research.

* * *

The school report card is a prime illustration of how neoliberal think tanks repackage doctrine ina form that second-hand dealers in ideas, in this case commercial media, can retail to the generalpublic, or at least to parents of school-aged children. The doctrine was first enunciated by Milton

12 Atlas Economic Research Foundation, Sir Antony Fisher, no date,http://atlasnetwork.org/founder.php.
http://atlasnetwork.org/founder.phphttp://atlasnetwork.org/founder.phphttp://atlasnetwork.org/founder.phphttp://atlasnetwork.org/founder.php


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Friedman in his 1955 essay, The role of government in education.13 Friedman worried aboutthe trend toward collectivism and called for the denationalization of education. Hecomplained that public schoolsgovernment schools, he called themhad an unfairadvantage over private schools because parents could send their children to public schoolswithout special payment. Very few parents could send their children to private or parochial

schools unless they too were subsidized. He worried that government schools would engage inindoctrination inhibiting freedom of thought and belief, but did not seem to be concerned thatprivate schools might engage in indoctrination for the free market or for a religious dogma. Tomove away from government schools, Friedman proposed a system of vouchers, which localgovernments would give to each child through the childs family to pay for a general educationat any type of school the family deemed appropriate. Competitive private enterprise, Friedmanclaimed, was likely to be far more efficient in meeting consumer demands than...nationalized...enterprises, but presented no evidence to back this proposition. It was an example of faithprevailing over fact.

In 1995, Friedman renewed his call to privatize public education in a major article in theWashington Post.14 Public schools were not really public at all, he claimed, but simply private

fiefs primarily of the administrators and the union officials. Government schools neededcompetition from the private sector, which could transform education, just like UPS and FederalExpress had transformed package and message delivery. Once again Friedman recommendedvouchers as the way forward, but vouchers were not to be seen as an end in themselves. Theywere a means to make a transition from a government to a market system. Vouchers, however,were a hard-sell in a country that believed in the separation of church and state. Many peoplewere opposed to the use of government-financed vouchers to send children to religious schools.So neoliberals developed report cards as an interim measure, to build momentum for vouchers.

3. The California connection

Friedmans adopted state of California was one of the first to create state-wide school reportcards on individual school performance. It was a precursor to the Fraser Institutes report card,with one important difference. Public education needs accountability and resources. The state ofCalifornia tried to balance these factors. The Fraser Institute, in contrast, took one measure ofaccountabilitythe report cardand, to achieve its ideological purpose, ignored the need forresources.

During the 1980s, funding for education in California was in a precarious state thanks to thepassage of Proposition 13, The Peoples Initiative to Limit Property Taxation, in 1978. Thismeasure amended the state constitution to permanently lower property taxes which, up to thattime, had been a key source of funding for public education. In response, the state took control ofschool district funding, precipitating a substantial decline in state-wide school spending relative

to other states. The decline in spending likely led to larger class sizes and perhaps to lowerachievement levels for students in California compared with those across the nation, reports theRand Corporation in a review of accountability in education.15 The researchers could not be more

13Milton Friedman, The role of government in education, in Robert A. Solo, ed., Economics and the publicinterest, Rutgers University Press, 1955.14 Milton Friedman, Public schools: Make them private, Washington Post, 19 Feb 1995, C7.15Jennifer Sloan McCombs and Stephen J, Carroll, Ultimate test: Who is accountable for education if everybodyfails?Rand Review, Spring 2005, 14.


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definitive because there are no reliable longitudinal data on student achievement in Californiathat reach back to the 1970s, thus preventing a direct comparison between school funding andstudent achievement.16 They did note, however, that in the well-funded 1970s, Californiaspublic schools were considered to be among the nations best. They also found that Californiastudents taking national achievement tests during the underfunded 1990s underperformed on

average students in every other state except Louisiana and Mississippi.To counter the serious deficiencies in resources and performance, in 1987, a coalition ofteachers, administrators and parents unveiled a ballot measure that would boost funding for statepublic education. To garner public support for increased spending and to increase accountability,the proposal required that report cards be produced to monitor the progress of California schools.

This measure, Proposition 98, The Classroom Instruction Improvement and AccountabilityAct, was placed on the November 8, 1988 ballot. It would amend the state constitution toguarantee a minimum percentage of the state budget would go to public education each year. Inreturn for the guaranteed funding, the department of education would prepare schoolaccountability report cards to let parents and communities measure student progress, schoolconditions and the quality of education. The report card was an expansion of an earlier versionestablished in 1983 by the state Superintendent of Public Instruction as part of its accountabilityprogram. The proposition was opposed by business groups, major state newspapers, theCalifornia Taxpayers Association and Republican Gov. George Deukmejian, who voicedconcern about increased taxes. The measure barely squeaked through, 50.8% to 49.2%.17

The change did not help much because it virtually institutionalized the reliance of educationfunding on the extreme fluctuations in the states economy. But it did provide an entry forneoliberals and other enemies of public education, who had been waiting for an opportunity topromote school choice in the state.

Continued underfunding had a predictable impact on educational performance: the second-highest ratio of students-per-teacher of any state, low per-pupil spending on school construction,

and a growing workforce of newly employed teachers not yet formally trained or certified,working in urban and low-performing schools and in schools with high percentages of low-income and minority students. The enemies of public education saw their opportunity. Analliance of free-market businessmen, private school owners and religious fundamentalistssponsored Proposition 174, the Parental Choice in Education initiative, which was placed onthe 1993 ballot. Co-chairing the sponsor group, called Excel (Excellence Through Choice inEducation League) was businessman Everett Berg, chairman of the board of the Pacific ResearchInstitute, one of the dealerships established by Antony Fisher. School choice was a logicalsolution to the states educational woes, the group explained. It would give every school-agechild in the state a voucher for $2,600about half the cost of educating a child for a year in thepublic systemto attend any public or private school.18 Milton Friedman publicly endorsed

16 Ibid, 17.17Don Williamson, City schools do well in state assessment, San Diego Union-Tribune, 16 Jan 1985, B3; MichaelSmolens, Education funding initiative unveiled, San Diego Union-Tribune, 17 Nov 1987, A3; Mark Arner,2measures would aid schools, San Diego Union-Tribune, 30 Sep 1988, A3; Mark Arner, Honig cites Prop. 98win as a sign voters support school reform campaign, San Diego Union-Tribune, 10 Nov 1988, A14.18School budget plan hotly debated,San Francisco Chronicle, 16 Mar 1992.


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Proposition 174, calling it by far the best formulated version that has been put to votersanywhere.19

But the proposition lost badly, with 69.5 percent of voters opposed. At first, the propositionsbackers considered putting another measure on the ballot. But recognizing it would be a hardsell, they instead opted for report cards, which were already being produced by the state

government and which would still move the education agenda in the desired direction. ThePacific Research Institute produced its first report card the following year, blaming the poorshowing by many schools on decisions by government education officials20 and not the lack ofadequate funding.

Aside from their common parentage in Antony Fisher, PRI and Fraser Institute are closelyconnected. PRIs long-standing president, Sally Pipes, started out as an economist with the BCCouncil of Forest Industries, then worked at the Fraser as Michael Walkers deputy for over adecade before departing for the PRI. Pipes was certainly clear about PRIs mission. The year ofthe voucher ballot she reported that our programs restore to parents the fundamental right tochoose which schools their children will attend, propose ways to privatize services provided bythe state, employ market forces in protecting the environment, and remove the regulatory and taxbarriers that impede the engines of entrepreneurship.21 PRI set up a Center for School Reform,which began churning out an array studies and report cards that all seemed to argue for vouchersand increased school choice.22

There are other connections too. Jason Clemens, a Fraser Institute senior researcher for 11 years,was appointed as PRIs director of research in 2008. And Everett Berg, the former PRI chairmanand school choice proponent, moved from Emeryville, California to Victoria, joining the FraserInstitute board in 1996. The following year, the PRI released its first report card and the FraserInstitutes five-year plan, Towards the new millennium, concerned itself with a new area offocus: school choice.

4. The report card comes to British ColumbiaMilton Friedmans 1995 article attacking government schools may have put the dealerships onnotice that they needed to boost their efforts to privatize education. But how could the FraserInstitute sell the Friedman doctrine to a Canadian public that was largely supportive of publiceducation? Vouchers and charter schools were non-starters in Canada. For its first 20 years, theinstitute showed little interest in education. It did publish one book in 1988 by SFU economicsprofessor and Fraser Institute fellow Stephen Easton, a staunch advocate for school choice. Thebook attempted to apply economics to education and foundpredictablythat BCs educationsystem was not cost effective.23 The solution was classic Friedman: increase the use of vouchersfor private schools. This would save money, Easton argued, because private schools pay teachers

less. Vouchers were also good policy because of the general dissatisfaction with the state ofpublic education in BC, Easton claimed, but presented no evidence to back the claim.

19 Quoted in David Harmer, School choice: Why you need itHow you get it, Cato Institute, 1994, 86.20 Jonathan Marshall, Test scores analysis shows state schools doing well,San Francisco Chronicle,9 Sep 1997, A1.21San Francisco think tank elects new officers, PR Newswire, 28 Jul 1993.22 Sam Delson, Hayes education package includes plan for vouchers,Riverside Press-Enterprise,17 Feb 1999, B7.23 Stephen Easton,Education in Canada, Vancouver: Fraser Institute, 1988.


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Easton fits right in with the Mont Plerin neoliberals. He received his Ph.D. from MiltonFriedmans University of Chicago School of Economics in the late 70s and went to work inSFUs Economics Department. This was a hotbed of neoliberal and Fraser Institute activityduring those years, with about a half-dozen faculty members serving as Fraser Institute authorsor senior fellows. In the mid-90s, Easton turned his attention to global economic freedom,

helping the institute concoct another prominent index, the economic freedom of the world. Hetook a shot at arguing that correctional services in Canada should be privatized (1998) and thatmarijuana use should be legalized (2008), based, perhaps, on Friedmans dictum that makingmarijuana use illegal offends against our personal sovereignty. Eastons most enduringcontribution to the promotion of neoliberal doctrine, though, was his co-authorship of the reportcard.24

Two years after Friedman called for renewed effort to get rid ofgovernment schools, MichaelWalker outlined the institutes education strategy in the Fraser Institutes leaked 1997 five-yeardraft plan. At the moment, the Institute does not have an ongoing presence in one of the centraldebates occurring in North America, namely the issue of education choice...we should have, thedocument declared. Walkers first objective was to work with Friedmans voucher-advocacy

foundation to pursue programs of mutual interest. There were certainly longstanding tiesbetween Friedman and Walker. They were close friends; Friedman was an early Fraser Instituteadviser and author. And Walker did join Milton and Rose Friedmans organization, theFoundation for Educational Choice, based in Indianapolis. He was still a director of thatorganization in 2010.

The institutes second education choice objective was to establish an index of schooleffectiveness based on published data and on survey data collected for the purpose. The index,the five-year plan continued, will require considerable effort...while the cost per school shouldbe relatively modest, the overall cost even for a single province would be significant. Walkerestimated a minimum of $250,000 per year would be required to accomplish this project, a figurethat would balloon as new provinces were added. The institute didnt yet have an expert in thisarea as the document referred to this position, so it would be necessary to add an educationpolicy specialist or a person who will become our education policy specialist.25

That would be Peter Cowley. Cowley had a long way to go to become the Frasers educationpolicy specialistor did he? Cowleys qualifications for the job were a B. Comm. from UBC,plus several decades of marketing and management in childrens crib manufacturing and othersectors. Evidently, management and marketing experience, not a background in education policy,were the requirements for the job. Easton would do the ideologically driven number crunchingand Cowley, the selling. It was an ideal partnership for the institute and one that has endured forover a decade.

Cowley became interested in the school system in the mid-90s, when he participated in a

parents group at Kitsilano Secondary School. He wrote a primer titled What you need to knownow to help your student prepare for post-secondary education, which outlined the coursesstudents needed to take for various post-secondary education and training options. The guide waspopular and several years later Cowley set up a web site for it. He also expressed interest inevaluating schools by providing profiles so parents could choose the school best suited for their

24 Eastons work to privatize and marketize everything seems to be highly regarded by his colleagues at SFU, sincehe won the 2009 Deans Medal for Academic Excellence.25 Fraser Institute, Toward the new millenniumA five year plan for the Fraser InstituteDraft, no date, 16.


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kids. Thats when he seems to have caught the Frasers attention. The think tank approached himto work on a five-year study of ranking schools. He spent the next year working with Eastonanalyzing Ministry of Education statistics.26 He was on his way to becoming the instituteseducation policy specialist.

The first secondary school report card was released in March 1998, based on results of

provincially-administered exams. In 1999, the BC Ministry of Education, with New DemocratPaul Ramsey as minister, began conducting Foundations Skills Assessment tests in elementaryschools. The results of the 1999/2000 and 2000/2001 FSA tests were posted on the ministrysweb site in October 2001. In 2002, the ministry made school catchment areas permeable,meaning that parents could apply to enrol children in out-of-catchment area schools if space andfacilities were available, after catchment area students had enrolled. The following year, in June2003, the Fraser Institute began issuing elementary school report cards based on FSA scores.27

Expansion in other provinces was rapid, encompassing Alberta secondary schools in 1999;Quebec secondary schools in 2000 (with the Montreal Economic Institute); Ontario secondaryschools in 2001; Alberta elementary schools in 2002; Ontario elementary schools in 2003 (thesame year the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, a neoliberal think tank in Halifax, startedranking all secondary schools in Atlantic Canada); BC aboriginal education in 2004; andWashington state elementary, middle, and high schools in 2009 (with the Evergreen FreedomFoundation).

To support the report cards, Walker relied on anonymous donors and two foundations, the Lotteand John Hecht Memorial Foundation, whose money came from selling arms, and theW. Garfield Weston Foundation, whose money comes from a less colourful sourcesellingbiscuits. John Hecht was a Vancouver-based weapons merchant who sold arms to the MiddleEastplaying both sides of the 1960s Arab-Israeli conflictand in most other regions of theworld. Hecht was a personal friend of George H.W. Bush and raised money for Bushspresidential bid. Hecht may have been involved in the illegal Iran-Contra affair, selling arms to

Iran to provide funds to arm the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. He pumped his profits into aVancouver real estate empire and also owned properties in Europe, Israel, Argentina and theUnited States. Hecht died in 1988 on his European honeymoon with his second wife. He left thebulk of his fortune, estimated at between thirty-two and one hundred million dollars, to hischaritable foundation,28 which provides funds in two areas: alternative medicine in the treatmentof cancer; and economic education promoting the free market. This second program was custom-made for Walker. Over the years the Hecht Foundation has provided hundreds of thousands ofdollars to finance the preparation of the BC report cards.

Galen Weston heads Canadas third wealthiest family (after the Thomsons and the Irvings). Heand his family have become an important funding source for the Frasers education work. Mostof the W. Garfield Weston Foundations funding is for good works. It is lead funder for

Canadian Merit Scholarships, which enables high school students to attend university. It alsoleads in donations to the Nature Conservancy of Canada to purchase ecologically significantproperties, and the Royal Ontario Museum. But, beginning in 2003, Weston financed the Fraser

26Jamie Lamb, Pamphlet an eye-opener for parents of high-school students, Vancouver Sun, 23 Sep 1994, A3;Terry Taylor, On-line parents guide offers timely information, The Province, 9 Sep 1996, B5; Special report:Grading our schools, The Province, 4 Mar 1998, A9.27John Bermingham, 50,000gear up for exams, The Province, 20 June 1999, A18.28A fistful of secret powerand an arms business to prop it up,The Province, 4 Feb 1994, A30. The foundationheld assets of $78 million in 2005.


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Institutes school vouchers program in Ontario and Alberta, which sends poor children to privateand religious schools. Weston also finances the Ontario report cards and provides awards forschools that top the lists and for those that show the greatest improvement from the previousyear. By 2008, the last year for which figures are available, Weston had donated $15 million tothe Fraser Institutes education programs.29

With the deep pockets of its conservative foundation backers, continued support frommainstream media, and increasing online access to the rankings, the institutes strategy is torepeat the rankings frequently enough until they become an accepted component of the climateof ideas about education. Once that goal is achieved, the Fraser will be ready for the next step inthe trek towards the unequal, individualistic, free-market society envisioned by the Mont Plerinneoliberals.

Writing in the institutes magazine, Fraser Forum, Peter Cowley is clear about the purpose ofschool ranking: to establish one of the conditions necessary for a free market in education;namely, the availability to consumers, in this case parents, of reliable information on thecomparative value of services provided by competing suppliers, in this case schools.30

A second condition necessary for a free market in education, Cowley writes, is to create a systemin which government or private entities provide vouchers so that children from disadvantagedfamilies can attend private schools.31 Limiting vouchers to children from disadvantaged familieswas a major modification of the Friedman doctrine. As noted earlier, Proposition 174 lost badlyin California. Vouchers were proving to be a hard sell. So neoliberal strategists reframed theirproposals to make them less threatening to important suburban and Republican constituencies.Key was to shift the idea of vouchers from a universal policy for all school children to onetargeted at low-income families, making vouchers more saleable yet still moving theprivatization agenda forward.32

The Fraser Institute hewed closely to the new thinking in its voucher program in Ontario andAlberta, which it calls Children First, with funding from the Westons. Poor families compete for

these vouchers, which can be used to attend religious or private schools. Perhaps the institute isworking toward the day when one provincial government offers its own taxpayer-financedvouchers and for-profit school chains flood into that province. This prospect is most likely tooccur first in Alberta, where Danielle Smith, leader of the Wildrose Alliance, stands a goodchance of becoming the next premier. Smith has advocated vouchers since she was a FraserInstitute intern in the mid-90s. While in the think tanks employ, she coauthored a study withVancouver Sun editorial pages editor Fazil Mihlar (then the institutes director of deregulation),which concluded that schools must be given the freedom to innovate, and that making schoolscompete through a voucher scheme was the way to do this.33

29 Canadian Revenue Agency, Qualified doneesThe W. Garfield Weston Foundation, Charities Listings,

modified 10 Nov 2008,http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/chrts-gvng/lstngs/menu-eng.html.30 Peter Cowley, Bringing education into the marketplace: Part IThe report card on schools,Fraser Forum,Sep 2007, 6.31 Peter Cowley, Bringing education into the marketplace: Part IIDuplicating successful schools, Fraser Forum,Sep 2007, 13-16.32 Jeffrey Henig, Education policy from 1980 to the present: The politics of privatization, in Brian J. Glenn andSteven M. Teles, eds., Conservatism and American political development, New York: Oxford University Press,2009, 306.33Government-sponsored training programs not a solution for unemployed Canadians, News release, FraserInstitute, 12 Dec 1997,http://oldfraser.lexi.net/media/media_releases/1997/19971212.html.
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The institute has promoted vouchers in a variety of publications. In 2001Year 3 of the reportcardit published a book on privatization and vouchers, with contributions from leadingCanadian, American and international school choice advocates.34 In 2005, it co-published, withthe neoliberal Montreal Economic Institute, a document titled Caring for Canadians in a Canadastrong and free, written by Fraser Institute senior fellows Mike Harris and Preston Manning.

They argue that the way to really care for Canadians is to give them school choice andvouchers.35

To prepare for the day when taxpayer-funded vouchers become a reality, the Fraser Institute hasa Web site promoting for-profit school chains. Called the School Chain Showcase, the purposeof the site is to improve education worldwide by encouraging and assisting successful schoolchains throughout the world to expand nationally and internationally.36

The point of the exercise is to undermine public confidence in the system as a whole, to frameeducation as a market composed of hundreds of individual schools where the improvement ordeterioration of a schools ranking is due to the effort of principal, teachers, and students. TheFraser Institute already has a program to make this point. It hands out awardswith a little cash(also financed by the Westons)in BC, Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec, to schools whoserankings topped the list over five years, schools whose rankings went up the most, and schoolswhose rankings are higher than they should be, given their socioeconomic status. Conclusion:education is improved through the efforts of individual schools. Government officials andteachers unions play no part in this endeavour. In fact, as Milton Friedman insisted, they are theenemy, resisting improved education because they promote their own agendas, which are notthose of parents and children.

5. Report card successesThe Fraser Institutes school ranking program can be seen as an effective application of the MontPlerin Societys agenda. Neoliberal doctrine was supplied by Milton Friedman. The FraserInstitute distributed the doctrine to targeted mediathe second-hand dealersby wrapping it inresearch, controversial as the research might be. And some media have done an exemplary job ofdisseminating the doctrine/research to the general public. The final step would be for asympatheticand neoliberalgovernment to move public policy in the direction of educationchoice. During the 1990s, it was thought that Ontarios Mike Harris government, with itscommon sense revolution, would be the one. However, the climate of ideas had not beensufficiently transformed and neoliberalism in education made little headway. Another candidateis the Gordon Campbell government in BCCampbell was honorary chair at the FraserInstitutes 35th anniversary celebrationbut support for public education remains strong evenafter a decade of report cards.

The report cards special contribution to furthering neoliberal penetration of education in Canadais the message that the school itselfits administration, teaching and counsellingmakes thedifference in how well students do on provincially administered tests and exams. The instituteclaims the report card is its attempt to answer the question: In general, how is the school doing,academically, compared to other schools in the Report Card? The institute is simply providing a

34 Claudia Hepburn, ed., Can the market save our schools? Vancouver: Fraser Institute, 2001.35 Mike Harris and Preston Manning, Caring for Canadians in a Canada strong and free, Fraser Institute andMontreal Economic Institute, 2005.36 School Chain Showcase, Who we are? Fraser Institute, 2010,http://www.schoolchains.org/en/about-us.
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public service that allows parents to choose the school that is best for their children, it declares.But anyone with eyes can see that students in private schools do better that students in publicschools, and students in public schools in upper-income areas do better than students in lower-income areas.

No question but that the report card is having an impact on how parents of school-age children

think about schools. Many parents considered the reputation of a local school when decidingwhere to buy a house. They mostly relied on word-of-mouth accounts to judge school quality.But the desire of parents to buy into sought-after areas increased once the BC governmentmandated province-wide standardized tests for reading, writing and math. Of course these arenarrow measures of success, but they offered parents something concrete to go along with whatthey could see for themselves and hear from others.

Some commercial media helped authenticate the report card as legitimate public informationfrom the first year it was produced. The 1998 report card on BC secondary schools was giventhree full days of coverage in The Province, including for-and-against opinion pieces by FraserInstitute executive director Michael Walker and BC Teachers Federation president Kit Krieger,plus a host of letters to the editor for and against the rankings. The extensive coverage validatedthe rankings as an important public policy issue. It probably didnt hurt the Fraser Institutesideological agenda that The Province and other Southam newspapers had recently (1996) beenpurchased by Conrad Black, a staunch neoliberal himself. Blacks wife, Barbara Amiel, and hislong-time partner, David Radler, joined the Fraser Institute board of trustees and Blackscompany, Hollinger Inc., donated $100,000 to the Fraser Institute building fund.

Cowley reported in his 2007 Fraser Forum article that,

[I]n order to ensure the widest possible dissemination of each report cardsresults, the Institute has arranged with a single major newspaper or newsmagazineto publish all of the individual school reports within the relevant region. The leadmedia are the Vancouver Sun, Calgary Herald,Edmonton Sun, Toronto Sun,

Ottawa Citizen, Windsor Starnewspapers, and lActualit, Qubecs leadingnewsmagazine. Combined, these media annually publish nearly 300 full pagesreaching millions of readersof the report cards findings and important relatedstories. In addition, stories about the report cards abound on radio and televisionand in community papers whenever there is a new release. In 2006 alone, morethan 1,000 stories about the report cards were published.37

Media support for the report cards has dwindled since 2006, at least in BC. In February 2010,neither The Vancouver Sun, The Province, nor the Victoria Times-Colonistgave over their pagesto detailed elementary school rankings as they had in the past. Instead, the Fraser approachedBlack Press, publisher of 70 community and local papers across BC, with an offer of exclusive

rights to run the report cards before other media in the province. Some editors and publishers atBlack papers werent pleased with the companys decision to run the rankings but did run themas ordered by head office.38

37Peter Cowley, Bringing education into the marketplace: Part I The report cards on schools, Fraser Forum,Sep 2007, 7.38 Janet Steffenhagen, Black press publisher rebukes Fraser Institute report card, 4 Feb 2010,http://communities.canada.com/VANCOUVERSUN/blogs/reportcard/archive/2010/02/04/black-press-editorial-lambastes-fraser-institute-report-card.aspx.
http://communities.canada.com/VANCOUVERSUN/blogs/reportcard/archive/2010/02/04/black-press-editorial-lambastes-fraser-institute-report-card.aspxhttp://communities.canada.com/VANCOUVERSUN/blogs/reportcard/archive/2010/02/04/black-press-editorial-lambastes-fraser-institute-report-card.aspxhttp://communities.canada.com/VANCOUVERSUN/blogs/reportcard/archive/2010/02/04/black-press-editorial-lambastes-fraser-institute-report-card.aspxhttp://communities.canada.com/VANCOUVERSUN/blogs/reportcard/archive/2010/02/04/black-press-editorial-lambastes-fraser-institute-report-card.aspxhttp://communities.canada.com/VANCOUVERSUN/blogs/reportcard/archive/2010/02/04/black-press-editorial-lambastes-fraser-institute-report-card.aspx


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Black Press and CanWest didnt run the detailed secondary school report card in June 2010. Therankings, however, did receive news coverage in the newspapers of the Glacier Media Group,such as the Prince George Citizen. The institute seems to have decided it can reach its targetaudiences more directly through social media like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (for itsvideos), along with a web site dedicated to school rankings. This approach gives the institute

greater control over the message. There is no longer any need for opinion pieces from critics.* * *

With the rankings receiving widespread coverage, real estate agents didnt miss a beat, andincorporated the results into their marketing pitches. Brock Smeaton, an agent at PrudentialSussex Realty in West Vancouver, for instance, touts the municipalitys education options.

Some of the finest schools in the province, both public and private, are found inWest Vancouver. Independent assessments of educational institutions such as theFraser Institutes annual ranking of BC schools consistently place WestVancouver schools in the upper echelons. Above average performance onstandardized tests, high graduation rates, and effective student support by school

resources and parents at home are typical of the findings.39

Hazel Tan, who works out of Royal LePages Kerrisdale office, lists the Fraser Institute as asource of information about education, along with the Vancouver School Board, the Universityof British Columbia and other post-secondary institutions.40

As for parents who couldnt afford to buy in prime real estate markets like West Vancouver orVancouver West Side, transferring their children into schools in those districts became an optionafter the Campbell government loosened catchment-area restrictions in 2002.

A study by economist Jane Friesen and colleagues at Simon Fraser Universitys Centre forEducation Research and Policy found some evidence that students in Vancouver-area elementaryschools were more likely to leave their school when they learned that their schoolmates had

performed relatively poorly on FSA tests.41 The drawback to this study is that it accepts theneoliberal frame, that increase[d] competition in markets for education can improve educationaloutcomes by increasing disadvantaged students access to higher quality schools, and by causingunderperforming schools to become more effective or to shrink as families vote with theirfeet.42 The studys authors, who received comments and discussion from Stephen Easton, setout to discover the most effective way to get information about school rankings into parentshands.

Friesen looked at school-exit decisions of almost 75,000 Grade 4 students enrolled in 14 LowerMainland school districts between 1999 and 2004. Two categories of students were most likelyto leave their low-performing schools, she found: English-speaking students in low-incomeneighbourhoods and Chinese-speaking students regardless of neighbourhood. But the trend was

39 Brock Smeaton, Educational options: An attraction of West Van real estate, 27 Apr 2010,http://www.brocksmeaton.com/real-estate-blog/market-news/educational-options-an-attraction-of-west-van-real-estate/.40 Hazel Tan, Local links: Education, Royal LePage, no date,http://www.hazeltan.ca/localinks.htm.41 Jane Friesen, Mohsen Javdani and Simon Woodcock, Does public information about school quality lead to flightfrom low-achieving schools? Simon Fraser University, Centre for Education Research and Policy, 13 Jan 2010,http://www.sfu.ca/cerp/research/test_info_and_school_choice.pdf; Janet Steffenhagen, Chinese-speaking parentsmore likely to take their kids out of low-ranked schools,Vancouver Sun, 13 Jan 2010, A4.42 Friesen et al., 2.
http://www.brocksmeaton.com/real-estate-blog/market-news/educational-options-an-attraction-of-west-van-real-estate/http://www.brocksmeaton.com/real-estate-blog/market-news/educational-options-an-attraction-of-west-van-real-estate/http://www.brocksmeaton.com/real-estate-blog/market-news/educational-options-an-attraction-of-west-van-real-estate/http://www.hazeltan.ca/localinks.htmhttp://www.hazeltan.ca/localinks.htmhttp://www.hazeltan.ca/localinks.htmhttp://www.sfu.ca/cerp/research/test_info_and_school_choice.pdfhttp://www.sfu.ca/cerp/research/test_info_and_school_choice.pdfhttp://www.sfu.ca/cerp/research/test_info_and_school_choice.pdfhttp://www.hazeltan.ca/localinks.htmhttp://www.brocksmeaton.com/real-estate-blog/market-news/educational-options-an-attraction-of-west-van-real-estate/http://www.brocksmeaton.com/real-estate-blog/market-news/educational-options-an-attraction-of-west-van-real-estate/


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not very pronounced. Normally, Friesen notes, in a school serving a lower-income populationwith 50 Grade 4 students, about five students move to another school between Grade 4 and 5.Receiving what Friesen calls very bad news about average FSA scores led to one additionalstudent leaving. Friesen had nothing to say about the 34 students who chose to remain in theirneighbourhood schools. What do they and their families think about the very bad news?Was it

really very bad news, or simply the studys framing?The situation in secondary schools may be more dramatic. Former Vancouver school trusteeAndrea Reimer observed that many parents were applying for their children to attend schoolsoutside their neighbourhoods. She looked at enrolment fluctuations in city secondary schoolsbetween 2005 and 2006 and discovered the highest drops in enrolment occurred in East SideVancouver schools that scored among the lowest on the Fraser Institute rankings: John Oliver,Sir Charles Tupper, Templeton, David Thompson and Britannia. In contrast, Churchill, Prince ofWales, University Hill and Lord Byngall high-scoring schools on the West Sidegained themost students.43 With hundreds of families applying to these West Side schools, the chances ofgetting in are slim. They find other ways [of getting in], such as forging addresses, commentsCheryl Davis, from David Thompsons parent advisory council. Reimer, Davis and NPA school

trustee Don Lee all noticed that some parents were using covert methods, such as using agrandparents address, to apply for enrolment in West Side schools.

School rankings have also been a factor in some legal actions where parents were divorcing andwent before the courts for custody of their children. So far judges have rejected the rankings asevidence because they dont meet the standard of reliability which would be required of anexpert witness. Nonetheless, in six court actions (four in BC, one in Alberta and one in Ontario),parents have cited Fraser Institute rankings as a reason why one or the other of the parents shouldgain custody. In one 2003 BC case, the defendant parent obtained Fraser Institute rankings todemonstrate the superiority of the school he wanted his two children to attend and which wasnear his house. In response, the plaintiff mother obtained an expert opinion from a professor inSimon Fraser Universitys Faculty of Education, who concluded the Fraser Institute reportcould not be relied upon as a complete tool for a schools evaluation, given its narrow test area.The judge was not persuaded that a straight ranking system, as tendered by the Fraser Institute,is a reliable indicator of what is in these childrens best interests.44

In a 2006 case, the father didnt want the child to continue attending a private school which wasexpensive and which the Fraser Institute ranked no better than the public school system.45 In a2009 case, the judge declared that Fraser Institute ratings were not admissible as expert opiniongoing to and proving actual qualitative differences between the two schools proposed by thecontesting parents. But he did admit them as proof of the due diligence inquiries that [themother] made that guided, in part, her preference for the school she wanted.46

Further informal evidence of the report cards impact can be garnered from a discussion forum

on the Wedding Bells web site. This is a place where people planning weddings can discussissues of concern. One section of the web site is called BabyBells: Its all baby talk from hereon in. And under that heading is a section called Everything from toddler to teen. In May

43 Rob McMahon, Student exodus threatens East Side schools,Georgia Straight, 15 Feb 2007,http://www.straight.com/article-70975/student-exodus-threatens-east-side-schools.44 Hancock v. Hancock, 2003 BCSC 1089.45 Valastiak v. Valastiak, 2006 BCSC 525.46 A.E.E. v. L.L., 2009 BCPC 284.
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2010, user Evilmena started a new thread by informing the list she was thinking ahead to theschools she might enroll J in and in doing some googling I came across the Fraser Institute siteand compared some schools in my area. Evilmena wondered if in addition to school visits,proximity, childcare, etc. anyone uses these rankings to help determine where they will sendtheir children?47 She received about a dozen replies:

Wow, Ive never seen this report before, but Bradys school received pretty dismalgrades the past two years. Im not sure it will impact our decision, but its something newto stress about.

If the school we assumed hed go to had a below average rating for the last 5 years thenit would make me stop and think....Lucky our desired school has a good rating....

Yes we use them, but not in the same way you are. We are using them while houseshopping. You can tell a lot for these results and there is no way we will be buying ahouse in an area that has below average results on these tests.

I only use them to get a general idea but I kind of know where he will be going already.Seeing that the school was ranked quite high just reinforced that decision.

But not every response endorsed the rankings:Not really. I pretty much know that well be sending D to Brother Andre unless thatFrench-immersion school appeals to us.

I dont place any weight on them at all. As I understand it, the rankings are based on theprovincial standardized tests. I dont think standardized tests tell you much about achilds overall academic performance or potential....Our local school ranks fairly low butIm not worried in the slightest.

6. Whats wrong with the report card?Former Vancouver principal and school trustee Noel Herron writes that the Fraser Institutes

annual rankings simply serve as a provincial showcase for elite private schools that annually topthese lists with their sky-high fees and exclusionary (no ESL or kids with special needs)admission requirements.48

Given that the report card serves ideological, rather than scientific, purposes, it would besurprising if there were no serious problems with the methodology used to determine schoolrankings. To advance the Friedman doctrine that competition in education is the only way toimprove it, the Fraser Institute has had to concoct a research technique that purports todemonstrate that a school itselfits administration, teaching and counsellingis the key factorin student achievement. This proposition is crucial, since without it, school choice is an emptyvessel. The indicators the Fraser Institute selects, and the weightings it gives to them,exaggerates the differences between schools and school systems,49 writes retired Richmondteacher Dietmar Waber, and makes the school into the factor being measured and ranked. Thecontention, however, that the institutes rankings identify schools whose practices, if emulated,will lead to superior academic results is based on the assumption that the differences indicated by

47Evilmena, Fraser Institute school rankings Do you use them? 18 May 2010,http://forums.weddingbells.ca.48Noel Herron, The Fraser Institutes flawed report card, Teacher Newsmagazine 20, No. 2, Oct 2007,http://bctf.ca/publications/NewsmagArticle.aspx?id=14288.49Dietmar Waber, Examining the examiners Reflections on non-partisanship, the Fraser Institute and the reportcard on schools,Education Canada 46, Iss. 3, Summer 2006, 7.
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high-school exams and FSA tests are attributable to educators and school procedures. Thisassumption is supported by neither the argument nor the evidence presented by the report cardauthors.

Elementary school rankings

Elementary school rankings are based on The Foundation Skills Assessment, which arestandardized, provincially-administer tests written by all students in grades 4 and 7. They aredesigned to evaluate achievement in the 3-Rs only. Educators have many concerns about thesetests.

The tests take up too much time and attention that could go to more valuable learningexperiences. Until 2010, the tests took place in grade 4 and 7 classrooms over a two-weekperiod.50 Many teachers feel obligated to prepare their students specifically for the tests.

Standardized tests can be valuable, but only when used with multiple sources of data,including classroom-based assessment, to improve teaching effectiveness.

The FSAs pose enough problems when used for the intended purpose, to evaluate achievement in

the 3-Rs. But the Fraser Institute exacerbates the problems by using FSAs for purposes notintendedevaluating entire schools. To appear to do thisand to advance the Friedmandoctrinethey ignore crucial information about individual and socio-economic difference andmagnify minuscule differences in FSA scores by double- and triple-counting them.

To calculate the overall ratings for the BC elementary school report card, the Fraser Instituteemploys a formula that quantifies ten indicators: results of tests on reading, writing andnumeracy for both Grade 4 and Grade 7 students, gender differences in reading and numeracy inGrade 7, the percentage of students not meeting expectations, and the percentage of students whodid not write the tests because they were absent but not excused. The institute includes nomeasures of socio-economic status, race, ethnicity, disability, ESL, or school location, indetermining its rankings.

Using a set of indicators that reinforce each other, Helen Raptis argues, may distort schoolstrue test scores. Raptis presents the case of Torquay Elementary in Victoria, which tied withseveral other schools at 131st place provincially on the 2009 BC elementary school rankings.According to the Ministry of Educations website, she notes, the percentages of Torquays Grade4s meeting or exceeding expectations on the FSAs were 97 percent (reading), 85 percent(writing), and 87 percent (numeracy). These figures, Raptis continues, are significantly higherthan those for Pacific Christian School, which scored 82 percent (reading), 69 percent (writing),and 76 percent (numeracy). Yet Pacific Christian, which screens students, has smaller class sizesand charges $4,872 in tuition fees, ranked 108th. This example illustrates that the FraserInstitutes rankings do not accurately reflect a schools academic achievement as measured by

ministry-administered FSAs.51

The problem is that to calculate the rating out of ten, the FI doesn t use FSA data directly butweights the indicators. The average FSA score for each of the reading, writing and numeracytests for each of the two grades (6 tests in total) is allotted a possible 7.5 percent, for a total of 45percent of the overall rating.

50 In 2010, the province extended the period during which the tests could be given to five weeks, with a choice oftimes within this frame.51 Helen Raptis, The case against the Fraser Institutes school rankings,Victoria Times-Colonist, 7 Feb 2010, C10.


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The absence of gender differences in Grade 7 numeracy and reading results are rewarded with 10percent each.52 This indicator is based on the concern that boys or girls may do better than eachother in one or another of the tests. Authors Easton and Cowley offer no reasons for selecting 20percent as the appropriate award for gender equality, while allocating only 15 percent for the twotests themselves. This may be an astonishing reward for a very few schools. Referring to the

2005 card, Dietmar Waber points out that barely a dozen of Vancouvers 100 schools display aconsistency in gender equality on FSA tests over the last five years, [so] the benefit of using thisindicator and this degree of weighting may fairly be questioned. Nevertheless, some schoolsbenefit consistently from this formula.53

Moreover, the gender gap indicator biases school rankings in favour of those with higher socio-economic status (SES). Raptis notes that For reasons that researchers still do not fullyunderstand, the impact of gender on student achievement is more pronounced among low-SESthan high-SES populations. By including the gender gap in its measure of a schools overallrank, the institute again artificially depresses the standing of low-SES schools while bolsteringthe rank of (often high SES) single-gender independent schools where the gender indicatorcannot be applied.54

Depending on the percentage of tests written that are below the expectation for studentachievement at that grade level, a certain amount is deducted from the 25 percent allocated. Thisindicator penalizes low-performing schools by essentially accounting for their low test scorestwice, Raptis points out. Since students are tested to ensure they meet expectations before theycan gain entry to most private schools, these schools will have few, if any, students testing belowexpectations and will receive the full 25 percent. Waber reports that of the over 250 FSA testswritten in 2003/2004 by the Grade 4 and 7 students at one of these schools, York House, only asingle test fell below expectations.55

And finally, depending on the number of tests in the school that were not written, a certainamount is deducted from the remaining 10 percent. In the Fraser Institutes terminology, it is

the percentage of the tests that could have been written by students who were absent, exemptedfrom writing the test or, for any other reason, did not provide a meaningful response to thetest.56 This indicator was added in 2007 to encourage schools to ensure a high level ofparticipation in the FSA testing program.57 The question must be asked if the indicator isneoliberal advocacy or dispassionate measurement? Is the Fraser Institute attempting toingratiate itself with the provincial Ministry of Education by encouraging students to write theFSAs, or is it a counter-measure designed to blunt the campaign by teachers to persuade parentsnot to allow their children to write the FSAs. Schools will be penalized if the BCTF issuccessful. And there is no evidence that students who dont write the tests are among theweaker ones. It could just as well be the case that progressive parents of strong students object tothe tests. Nowhere in its reports does the Fraser Institute present any literature that backs up the

52The Frasers concern about gender differences is curious given the institutes lack of concern about this issuewithin its own organization. Its board of directors, for instance, comprises 44 males and three females.53 Waber, op cit., 5.54 Raptis, op cit.55 Waber, op cit., 7.56Peter Cowley and Stephen Easton, Report card on British Columbias elementary schools 2009, Fraser Institute,Feb 2009, 6.57Peter Cowley and Stephen Easton, Report card on British Columbias elementary schools 2007 edition, FraserInstitute, May 2007, 4.


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claim that a schools success depends on having a high percentage of its students write provincialtests.

Raptis claims this indicator also discriminates against students with low socio-economic status.Absenteeism, she notes, is known to be higher in low-SES schools because of various factors,such as poverty. Raptis concludes that the use of this indicator artificially deflates the rankings

of low-SES schools. A more accurate portrayal of a schools academic achievement can be foundin actual test scores.58

For all-girl and all-boy schools, such as some of the highest-ranking private schools, gender gapindicators are obviously not relevant. In these cases, tests not written is given a weight of 20percent and the percentage of tests not meeting expectation is weighted at 35 percent. Norationale is given for almost automatically awarding 20 percent to schools that cannot be affectedby the vagaries of the gender variable, Dietmar Waber comments.59 The arbitrary increases inthe values of these two indicators further biases the rankings, favouring controlled-entry schoolsand penalizing lower-SES schools.

A final distortion of the use of FSAs occurs as a result of the way the Fraser Institute combines

test results of elementary and middle schools. About 70 percent of the schools in the report cardhave both grades 4 and 7. The other 30 percent of schools do not enrol Grade 7 students. Instead,students in these schools move on to middle schools, usually after Grade 6. However, the FraserInstitute assigns the Grade 7 FSA results from middle schools to the school the students attendedin Grade 4. Is it fair to assign test scores to a school students havent attended for nearly twoyears? The institute thinks so: It is reasonable to assume that effective teaching during [Grades1 to 5] would benefit students as they move through their studies in middle school.60 But whatabout the teaching in the middle school? The institute presents no evidence to support its claimof reasonableness. One is left with the concern that the ranking for 30 percent of schools in theprovince is invalid, but is necessary to prop up the ideological underpinnings of the project.

Secondary schoolsFor BCs secondary schools, seven indicators are used:

The average exam mark in Grade 10, Grade 11 and Grade 12 courses that include amandatory provincial exam. This indicator is worth 25 percent of the total ranking score.It is flawed because the activity of writing compulsory exams reflects a small proportionof learning activities that occur in a school.

The percentage of mandatory exams written by the school in which students receivefailing grades. This accounts for another 25 percent of the ranking and is little more thana double counting of exam results.

The average difference by which the school mark exceeds the examination mark in the

courses considered in the first two indicators. This indicator is based on the dubiousproposition that the mark achieved on a provincial exam is more objective than theassessment of a student made by teachers in the classroom. If the school mark is higherthan the exam mark, it is labelled as grade inflation and the school is penalized. Thisindicator is worth 13 percent of the schools evaluation.

58 Raptis, op cit.59 Waber, op cit., 6.60 Cowley et al., op cit., 5.


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The differences between male and female students in their exam mark in English 10 andMath 10, which receive 6 percent each. One must ask why the gender gap is worth 20percent of an elementary schools ranking, but only 12 percent for a secondary school?For schools for which there are no gender gap results because only boys or girls areenrolled, such as the elite private schools, the school vs. exam mark difference is

increased from 12 to 25 percent.The graduation rate and the delayed advancement rate of students in the school, whichreceive 12.5 percent each. Where no composite dropout rate can be calculated because aschool doesnt enrol Grade 10 or Grade 11 students, the graduation rate is weighted at 25percent. Including scores for graduation rate and delayed advancement ratewhich tendto be lower among low socio-economic status studentshandicaps low-SES schools.Helen Raptis notes that the research literature is solid in its findings that studentsdecisions to drop out are not based solely on their school experiences, which is theassumption made by the Fraser Institute. Often a triggering event in the homeenvironment prompts students to lose interest in their studies. To imply that graduationand advancement are purely within the control of a school is erroneous and

discriminatory to low-SES schools,61

she writes.The institute admits that differences among students in interests, abilities, motivation, andwork-habits will inevitably have some impact upon the final results.Such differences inoutcomes cannot be wholly explained by the individual and family characteristics of the schoolsstudents. It seems reasonable, therefore, to include the average examination mark for each schoolas one indicator of effective teaching.62 But the institute makes no attempt to estimate whatfraction of the differences in outcomes can be explained by individual and family characteristics.

An extensive research literature indicates that demographic characteristics of students andfamilies largely account for differences in student achievement, in contrast to the Fraser Instituteclaim. This research negates the report cards validity. A key study that identified studentssocial and economic backgrounds as factors in their achievement was an analysis of the 2003US National Assessment of Educational Progress mathematics exam by Christopher and SarahTheule Lubienski of the University of Illinois.63 They based their research on the observation thatmath scores offer a clearer indication of a schools effectiveness than reading scores becausemath is less influenced by the childs home experiences than reading. If a school has an impacton student learning, it is more likely to be seen in mathematics than in reading. Their analysis oftests written by 343,000 Grade 4 and Grade 8 students in 13,500 US schools was the largest everundertaken. They were addressing previous studies which suggested that students at privateschools outperformed those at public schools and concluded that schools in the choice-basedindependent sector are the best model for improving achievement in public schools. The schoolmakes the difference, pro-choice advocates argued. Parents will move their children to higher-performing schools, thus forcing lower-scoring schools to improve or die. This is the samereasoning presented by the Fraser Institute in justifying its ranking programs.

But the Lubienskis analyzed the data further to determine whether the better results of privateschools were due simply to the fact that higher proportions of disadvantaged students are

61 Raptis, op cit.62 Cowley et al., op cit., 5.63Christopher Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski, Charter, private, public schools and academic achievement:New evidence from NAEP mathematics data, National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, Teachers

College, Columbia University, Jan 2006,http://www.ncspe.org/publications_files/OP111.pdf.
http://www.ncspe.org/publications_files/OP111.pdfhttp://www.ncspe.org/publications_files/OP111.pdfhttp://www.ncspe.org/publications_files/OP111.pdfhttp://www.ncspe.org/publications_files/OP111.pdf


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enrolled in public schools. They wanted to find out the extent to which the gaps persisted aftercontrolling for the many factors known to influence student achievement, such as socio-economic status, race/ethnicity, gender, disability, limited English proficiency and schoollocation, thereby better isolating the effects of the schools themselves. They concluded thatdifferences in test scores among students at different schools were due almost entirely to the

demographic differences among students and had little to do with what happens in the school.Overall, the Lubienskis reported, the study demonstrates that demographic differencesbetween students in public and private schools more than account for the relatively high rawscores of private schools. Indeed, after controlling for these differences, the presumablyadvantageous private school effect disappears, and even reverses in most cases.64

Voucher supporters attacked this work because it contradicted the frame the neoliberals wereconstructing, that students in private schools do better than those in public schools becauseprivate schools provide better education. The Lubienski study was invalid, they argued, becauseit didnt draw conclusions about the relative effectiveness of schools. Has student ability grownover time and might a particular type of school cause greater gains in achievement, they asked.

So the Lubienskis used a second data set, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, whichfollowed the achievement of a nationally representative sample of over 21,000 students in publicand private schools from Kindergarten to Grade 5.65 Using results on math tests, once again, theyfound public school students achieved almost identical growth as private, non-religious schoolstudents and higher growth than students in Catholic schools. It is worth noting how littlevariation school type really accounts for in students growth in achievement, contrary to theassumptions of voucher advocates, they conclude.66

The Lubienskis work is supported by other studies. A meta-analysis of the literature on socio-economic status and academic achievement in journal articles published between 1990 and 2000suggests that parents location in the socio-economic structure has a strong impact on studentsacademic achievement.67 And a study of Canadian children by Statistics Canada reported

similar findings, that income has particularly strong associations with cognitive outcomes(e.g.,...math and reading scores)....68

Evidence that private schools fare no better than public schools in preparing students for post-secondary education is provided by the work of George Bluman, a professor of mathematics atthe University of British Columbia. Bluman tracked the marks of first-year calculus and physicsstudents at UBC from the mid-1970s to 2005 and discovered that public school studentsoutperformed private school students on these tests. Bluman found little difference betweenstudents from East Side and West Side schools. University Hill (ranked 14th on the FraserInstitutes 2010 report card), Lord Byng (16th), Sir Winston Churchill (40th), and Eric Hamber(86th) on Vancouvers West Side, and Killarney (105th), Templeton (141st), and King George(223rd) on the East Side or West End, all ranked in the top third of schools in the 2005 first-year

64 Ibid, 3.65Christopher Lubienski, Corinna Crane and Sarah Theule Lubienski, What do we know about schooleffectiveness? Academic gains in public and private schools, Phi Delta Kappan, May 2008, 689-695.66 Ibid, 694.67Selcuk R. Sirin, Socioeconomic status and academic achievement: A meta-analytic review of research,Reviewof Educational Research 75, No. 3, Fall 2005, 438.68Shelley Phipps and Lynn Lethbridge, Income and the outcomes of children, Statistics Canada, 11F0019MIE,No. 281, May 2006, 4.


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courses. In contrast, private schools, such as York House (1st), St. Georges (1st) and West PointGrey Academy (4th) were near the bottom.69 So far, Bluman has not explained the results.

Further doubt is cast on the Fraser Institutes method of ranking schools by the C.D. HoweInstitute, which has produced its own rankings of BC, Alberta and Ontario schools and reachedsome very different conclusions. The Toronto-based C.D. Howe is not a classical neoliberal

think tank like the Fraser or the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, but it is still tightly tied toBig Business, which provides the bulk of the institutes funding. Coincidentally, perhaps, theinstitutes work usually supports business interests. For about six years, between 2002 and 2008,C.D. Howe was a leading advocate for deeper integration between Canada and the US,something greatly desired by business during those years. Not all Big Business interests supportthe Friedman agenda for school privatization. But they are strongly behind testing andaccountability, because of a desire for a better educated work force, one that is more useful tobusiness.

Howes education work is led by David Johnson, a professor of economics at Wilfred LaurierUniversity in Waterloo, Ont. He and other C.D. Howe fellows made an impassioned plea in theVancouver Sun for continued FSA testing.70 They argued that tracking students over time allowsus to...develop better programs to nurture the development of skills...setting the stage for asuccessful transition for students to post-secondary education and the workforce.

The main difference between Fraser and Johnsons rankings is that Johnson attempts to take intoaccount socio-economic status and other demographic variables in determining a schoolsperformance. He compares outcomes in schools where students come from similar backgrounds.But his goal is still to determine which schools do the best job of educating their students,71 thisbeing understood as performance on FSA tests or provincial exams.

A second difference is how the two think tanks handle middle schools. The Fraser assigns theGrade 7 results of students in middle schools to their elementary schools, based on the dubiousassumption that middle schools contribute nothing to student growth. Johnson more sensibly

separates middle schools into different groups and compares schools that end at Grade 7 as onegroup, schools that end at Grade 6 as another group, and then a third group comprising all othergrade ranges.

A third difference is that

reframing public education

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